Aminatou: Still Ahidjo’s daughter?

A conflict-free lifetime for any two people, be they Siamese twins living in virtually the same body, is an illusion. And if conflict is an omnipresent pandemic, reconciliation is the omnipotent panacea. it may leave scars, but it stops the bleeding and cauterizes the wound to keep it from festering.

so, yes, of all human interactions, reconciliation is sublime. it is the spirit that underpins the axiom which says ‘to err is human and to forgive, divine’. But even God, in his infinite mercy, only forgives what is confessed and renounced. That is why truth and reconciliation are inseparable in all serious conflict resolution.

A bare month back, tongues and pens wagged nonstop about the tantrums and excesses of an overindulged adolescent whom everybody would have simply ignored, were she not the President’s daughter.

Now it is about Aminatou Ahidjo – a lady of nearly fifty, who should join any political party she cares to join, or be given any ceremonial appointment, without it raising any eye brow, were she not the daughter of the deceased and disgraced President of Cameroon.

Even the post of Yaoundé Conference Centre Board Chair, to which she feels so honored to have been appointed, is an obscure sinecure. People hardly even remember who she takes over from. So it is only qua her father’s daughter that she is the object of censure.

It is her loyalty, or the lack of it, to her disgraced father that is on trial, not her mettle. And it is on the scale of that loyalty that her single-handed decision to reconcile with the Biya regime is being weighed. And the verdict so far seems to be “mene mene tekel”: weighed and found wanting.

But how is that possible if, as we said earlier, reconciliation is such a sublime exercise? Well, it cannot be otherwise unless the public reconciliation we see is accompanied by some truth to which none of us is privy. Incidentally, truth does not fear the light.

So there is a hollow ring to any truth between Ms. Ahidjo and this regime if it is not good enough for public consumption, and especially if it is not acknowledged by the rest of her family.

She is all gratitude to the President for letting her come back home from Senegal, in the first place.

Cameroonians have come to have nothing but a smirk and a snort for such obsequious attitudes – for people who always see a favour even when the President does no more than his constitutional duty. One of the puzzling things about our President is that few, if any, of us have seen him attend a funeral, be it that of a peer or close associate.

He is systematically represented. Could necrophobia be one of the hidden truths that preclude the repatriation of Ahidjo’s remains, as an unmistakable sign of genuine reconciliation? If, on the other hand, Aminatou’s volte-face is Biya’s breakthrough in divide-and-rule, then it must be a stirring of the knife in the wound.

But it would just show him as Ahidjo’s “meilleur eleve” in that political discipline. So one could well be tempted, like some posts in the social media suggest, to tell Ahidjo: “serves you right”. In fact, Cameroonians have no shortage of axes to grind with Ahidjo, despite the consensus that his patriotism towers incongruously over that of his successor.

For one, it has not been easy to live with the insulting memory of a semi-literate twirling the country around his little finger for over a quarter century, and then handpicking some dude by lottery, to perpetuate the tyranny for even longer. In any case, no crime is perfect. Wanting to stay on as back-seat driver brought things to a head, and Nemesis outstripped him.

Grievous was his fault, as Mark Anthony would say, and he has answered it grievously enough with his Humpty-Dumpty fall from the pinnacle of grandeur here to a pit of oblivion in foreign land. But faults and failures notwithstanding, the man was our Head of State, and the grandeur of Cameroon is there interred with him.

The return of his bones will not only restore some of our dignity; it will erase the “ingrate” stigma on Biya who, after everything, owes him virtually everything. It will, as a bonus, also give a touch of sincerity to the now half-hearted attempts to mend fences with the North.

But all this is not about Ahidjo the father. It is about his Esau of a daughter who is perceived by many as selling her birthright for a ladle of broth. Judging by her half-baked ideological blabbers about not being “a slave of history”, she seems to spurn principle because, as Luke Ananga once said, “it does not put bread on the table”. So, may she relish her welcome to the table while it lasts. One hopes she knows, however, that the food is all perishable and the finery is all “Chironko”.

As for the name she bears, we acknowledge that she would have shed it long ago, had she settled down with a husband. But it is with political flirtations as with looking for a spouse. Before you know it, somebody is popping the question, “Can one count on the loyalty of a spouse who has none for his/her own family?”